Timothy T.C. So

Timothy T. C. So is a PhD candidate in Psychology at Cambridge University. He is a Chartered Occupational Psychologist, a Research Associate of Cambridge University's Well-being Institute, and responsible for the Chinese PPND sites.

Co-authored by Cuimei Zhang.
Cuimei Zhang is a senior student at Smith College, currently pursuing a double major in Psychology and Economics. She has worked on two research projects in UPenn’s Positive Psychology Center and in an NIH-funded psychology project at Smith College.

Besides her research experience, her leadership experience in founding and leading two non-profit organizations in China also inspired her to explore more in positive organizational psychology.

Coaching is a process that helps people build up a systematic and dynamic mindset which leads to action that helps them flourish and maximize performance. Recently, many physicians, psychologists, health professionals, and coaches have endeavored to create effective coaching approaches based on positive psychology theory and methods in order to help individuals and organizations thrive.

The coaching industry has enlarged significantly because of increasing need from individuals and organizations. For example, 70% of healthcare costs can be attributed to the therapy of lifestyle-related chronic diseases. Thus there is an urgent need for science-based coaching competencies to support patients in the long-term development of healthy lifestyles. More than 80% of coaches are trained outside the fields of professional mental health or health and wellness. The conference, Coaching in Leadership & Healthcare: Theory, Practice & Result, will help coaches learn more about helping people change, develop, and achieve personal and professional goals.

This the 4th annual coaching conference led by the Institute of Coaching and jointly hosted by the Harvard Medical School and McLean Hospital. Started in 2008, each of the preceding coaching conferences has brought influential keynote speakers from both leadership coaching and the healthcare industry.

This year, the Conference has invited 23 major keynote speakers and leading contributors to discuss their perspectives on recent developments in coaching. There will be 4 tracks:

Jim Loehr, a performance psychologist and coach who has extended work experience with many leaders and large corporations, the co-founder of the Human Performance Institute, the author of 15 books including his most recent, The Power of Story. He will present a corporate athlete workshop titled Leadership & Well-Being: The Power of Story.

Manfred Kets de Vries is a Harvard neurologist, executive coach, and Director of Global Leadership Centre at the INSEAD Business School. With a unique focus in combining psychoanalysis, leadership, and executive coaching, his work is remarkable in exploring the “inner theater” of major leaders and has been often highlighted in the Harvard Business Review (HBR). During the conference, he will be interviewed by a longtime senior HBR editor, Diane Coutu.

Richard Boyatzis is Professor in the Departments of Organizational Behavior, Psychology and Cognitive Science at the Weatherhead School of Business, Case Western Reserve. He will lead a workshop on compassionate coaching. Last year he spoke about the neurological and physiological mechanisms of great coaching. This year, he will bring a corporate coaching client to show how his work has been translated into coaching results.

Robert Brooks, is a clinical psychologist and Harvard Medical School professor who is renowned around the world for the application of his work in the corporate world, parenting, and mental health initiatives. Brooks will present The Power of Mindset: Strategies for Resilience.

Eric Whitacre, an innovative composer and conductor, a premium speaker in TED, will entertain and inspire us with a live coaching demonstration and tell the story of his virtual chorus of 2000 voices.

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” Albert Einstein

I have been thinking about writing a year-end article for PositivePsychologyNews.com about my most unforgettable personal engagement in positive psychology in 2010 and how it influenced the world. I had several options: co-chairing the first Positive Psychology & Education Conference in China, editing for a Chinese publisher the Series of Science of Wellbeing which included the 15 best positive psychology books, conducting my research on flourishing and well-being at Cambridge, founding the Global Chinese Positive Psychology Association, and participating in all the exciting projects undertaken by the Cambridge Well-being Institute.

David Cameron, UK PM

On consideration, none of them can be more significant than being part of the UK Prime Minister’s announcement on 25 November of £2 million of funding for measuring well-being. My research work on flourishing and positive well-being in Cambridge brought me an invitation to witness the historic announcement. The UK Prime Minister argued strongly that GDP is no longer an adequate measure of the progress of a country, and that we need a new way to track the success and well-being of the nation. Here are some of my reflections on what I called ‘well-being for policy’ at the end of 2010.

Historical Rationale for GDP

In the 1930s, the architect of our national accounting system, Simon Kuznets, said more than once that a nation’s welfare can scarcely be inferred from its national income. But we have created and used a national accounting system which is firmly based on production and income generation. This is probably historical, and it had its time. After the Second World War, it was a primary goal to produce a lot of tangible stuff for living to replace what was destroyed in Europe, in China, and in Japan, as stated in Maslow’s Need of Hierarchy model that we need to fulfill the need for survival and safety at the very basic level. So our national accounting system became fixated on what we could produce.

Problems of GDP

Robert F. Kennedy

But its simplicity has given GDP an outsized influence on many governments’ decisions. The pursuit of economic growth as defined by an ever-rising GDP has become such a political imperative that any policy threatening to slow that rise has little chance of being adopted. Robert Kennedy said it so well in his poetic speech in 1968, about 20 years after the 2nd World War:

Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.’

I tried to visualize this by a table of contrasts, some of which I heard from Chip Conley recently:

GDP counts:

GDP doesn’t count:

Industries that cause air pollution
Ambulances to clear highways of damage
Destruction of the redwoods
Loss of natural wonder in chaotic sprawl
Napalm
Nuclear weapon
Locks for our doors
Jails for the people who break them
Armored police cars to fight riots
Guns and Knives
TV programs which glorify violence

The health of our children
Quality of their education
Joy of their play
The beauty of our poetry
Strength of our Marriagesintelligence of our public debate
Integrity of our public officials
Our wit
Our courage
Our wisdom
Our compassion
Our devotion to our country

Obviously, economic stability should remain a priority, but after a reasonable standard of living is secured, it is important that we take a broader view of the things that enrich the quality of our lives.

Well-being for Policy

Joseph Stiglitz

“What we measure affects what we do. If we have the wrong measures, we will strive for the wrong things,” says economist Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate and former Chief Economist at the World Bank. I strongly believe that if Kennedy were here today, he would have asked us psychologists to work together with economists, statisticians, and others to find ways to measure what makes life worthwhile, just as the British PM and French president Nicolas Sarkozy are currently doing. Are the French and British governments working on something brand new? Not actually.

Jigme Singye Wangchuck, Former King of Bhutan

In 1972, the tiny Himalayan nation of Bhutan opted to base its policies on indicators of ‘gross national happiness’, which was deemed more important than more conventional indicators such as GDP by King Jigme Singye Wangchuck. This is similar to what we are doing now, but we now have more evidence-based research and systematic data such that we could offer more advanced knowledge and comprehensive advice to the government and general public compared to 3 decades ago.

To me, as a junior scholar, there is nothing more exciting than working on research that can advise the central government and impact the whole society. On the other hand, for the government, there is also nothing better than backing up a policy with years of rigorous research and science contributed by a group of zealous scientists.

The measure of well-being is just a starting point and one example of how the science of well-being can impact life on our planet. In the future, we can rely more and more on evidence-based theories and interventions which can be applied to business, education, and community settings to establish a flourishing world – and this is the drive that keeps us striving to enhance our understanding of what contributes to well-being.

Thanks to Daniel Kahneman’s Day Reconstruction Method, to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Experience Sampling Method, and to those measures of life satisfaction, optimism, and meaning of life invented by Ed Diener, Martin Seligman and many others, we are now on the way to address Einstein’s claim that “Not everything that counts can be counted.” We can express the well-being agenda in a more precise and solid way and work toward flourishing life across our planet.

Previous articles in PPND (here and here) have examined the relationship between money and happiness as well as the Easterlin paradox illustrated in the graph below. To further elaborate on why the riches are not equivalent to happiness, I adopt the approach used by Daniel Kahneman, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, of looking at happiness as moment-to-moment experience instead of general well-being or flourishing. When we break down happiness into moment-to-moment experience, riches do not necessarily make people happier. Why not?

Wanting versus Having

“Money never made a man happy yet, nor will it. The more a man has, the more he wants.” Benjamin Franklin

Ed Diener and others argue that happiness is not having what you want, but wanting what you have. Psychologist Jeff Larsen and Amie McKibban ran experiments to test this concept. People who had more of what they wanted tended to be happier than those who had less, but this effect was mediated by appreciation and gratitude. Simply possessing something is not the key. Happiness comes from appreciating what you have.

Hedonic Adaptation

In a chapter in his book, Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology, Kahneman proposes that increasing incomes, which are expected to boost well-being by increasing consumption opportunities, may in fact have little lasting effect because of hedonic adaptation: the effect of consumption of material goods on well-being decreases when it exceeds a particular level of consumption. One classic example of such “hedonic adaptation” comes from a research of lottery winners, who were found no happier than non-winners a year after their windfall. Back in the 70’s, Tibor Scitovsky, a Stanford economist, argued that material goods yield little joy for most individuals and have almost no lasting happiness effect.

Social Comparison Theory

Well-being is more affected by relative income than by absolute income levels. The Social Comparison Theory proposed by social psychologist Leon Festinger explains that individuals evaluate their own opinions and desires by comparing themselves to others. Thus our perception that we are earning more or less than other people has a bigger effect on our well-being than what we are actually earning. This relative income hypothesis could explain the stability of average subjective well-being despite growth in national income, since the average rank of an individual does not necessarily rise as the society around him grows wealthier. People can choose to make either upward or downward comparisons. According to Suls and colleagues, achievement-oriented and competitive individuals tend to compare themselves to people who have more money and higher social status, so their money and status might not make them feel happier than others.

Time Allocation

According to economists Alan Krueger and Kahneman from Princeton, rich people are relatively satisfied with their lives but barely happier than others in terms of moment-to-moment experience. They tend to be tenser and do not spend more time in particularly enjoyable activities. For example, the American Time-Use Survey investigated people’s time allocation to various activities, measured by the weighted-average percentage of a non-sleep day, as illustrated in the figure below. People with family incomes greater than $100,000 spend on average 37% of their time on work and commute and 29% of their time on active and passive leisure, while people with family income less than $20,000 spend only 29% on work and commute but 41% on active and passive leisure.

George Lorimer sums it up:

“It’s good to have money and the things that money can buy, but it’s good, too, to check up once in a while and make sure that you haven’t lost the things that money can’t buy.”

Many of us realize the importance of a healthy diet and have started having 5 servings of fruits and vegetables per day. There is profound evidence about its benefits to our physical health. If I now tell you there are also 5 easy daily practices that will dramatically enhance your mental health (well-being), as much as eating fruits and vegetables enhance your physical health, will you be excited and take real action?

UK Government Project on Mental Well-being

In 2008, with the comission of UK Government’s Foresight Project, nef (New Economics Foundation) reviewed the inter-disciplinary work of over 400 scientists across the world in order to identify a set of evidence-based actions to improve well-being. The goal was to highlight those actions that individuals could build into their daily lives.

“A big question in mental well-being is what individuals can do. We found there are five categories of things that can make a profound difference to people’s well-being,” said Felicia Huppert, Professor of Psychology at the University of Cambridge, who led part of the project. “There are two significant findings in this report. First, each of the categories has strong scientific evidence behind it. Second, each action is so simple that everyone should aim to do them daily.”

What are the FIVE ways to Well-being?

The report titled “Mental Capital and Wellbeing” suggests people should aim 1) to connect with others, 2) to be active, 3) to take notice of their surroundings, 4) to keep learning, and 5) to give to their neighbors and communities.

Connect:
Connect with the people around you – family, friends, colleagues and neighbors. Regard these people as the foundation of your life and spend time in developing these relationships. These connections will support and enrich you in your daily life.

Be active:
Get your body moving in any way – go for a walk or run, go cycle, dance, play a game, etc. Exercise makes one feel good and grants you vitality. Which exercise? It is important to find a physical activity that suits your level of mobility and fitness, and that it’s one you really enjoy.

Take notice:
Be curious and aware of the world around you and of what you are feeling. Keep an eye out for the beautiful, observe the unusual, and catch sight of the surprising. Notice the changing seasons. Relish every moment, no matter whether you are walking to work, eating, or talking to friends. Reflecting on your own experiences will help you realize what matters to you.

Keep learning:
Try something new or come back to an old interest, and challenge yourself with an aspiration that you will enjoy achieving – learn to play an instrument or to cook your favorite dishes. Sign up for a course that you are interested in, or take on a different responsibility at work. Learning new things is fun while boosting confidence.

Give:
Do something nice for a friend, or even a stranger. Thank someone who has done you a favor. Smile at others. Devote your time to community and voluntary work. Look out, as well as in. See yourself and your happiness. Linking to the wider community could be extremely rewarding and could help form bonding with the people around you.

Time to Enhance our Mental Well-being

We have been spending a great deal of effort and money advancing our physical health and longevity. It might now also be time to brace our mental capital and well-being, when over 16% of population is suffering from mental disorders. While GDP, household income, longevity are consistently increasing over the past 50 years, problems such as depression, anxiety, suicide, substance abuse have never been as serious comparing to anytime in the past. None of us wants to live a depressed and anxious longer life. We all want a happier, more fulfilling, and more flourishing life.

Conclusion

Enhancing our well-being could well have been a mystery, yet thanks to scientific research we now have better and clearer insights. Truly, I am NOT implying that one will have serious mental disorders if he/she does not follow the above suggestions, nor will a person suffer immediately from serious physical illnesses without 5 servings of fruits and vegetables daily or without daily optimal exercise. As a scientist, I am also NOT trying to prescribe what kind of behavior you should take on, but I am descriptively reporting what science and research tells us about well-being. However, as an individual who cares about both physical and mental health, and who cares about well-being and flourishing of the community, I do suggest to my group of friends that it is time for action.

Reference:

Mental Capital and Wellbeing (July 2006 – October 2008) UK Foresight ReportNOTE: “Well-being” is the US spelling, and “wellbeing” is the UK spelling.

The emphasis of positive psychology on building the best things in life and making people’s lives fulfilling does not imply that we should ignore problems or dismiss the negative emotions that people experience. Positive psychology can make an additional contribution by offering rigorous and creative scientific work on how negative emotions can be good for humans. In this article, I kick an ongoing discussion of the benefits of negative emotions by introducing some insightful experiments conducted by Joe Forgas, an Australian psychologist.

‘All emotions have adaptive benefits.’ Charles Darwin (1809-1882)

Daniel Kahneman

Considerable research by scholars such as Nobel Prize winning psychologist, Daniel Kahneman, has demonstrated that our emotions (both negative and positive) influence our judgments and memories. However, while most research talks about how we should overcome sadness to make better judgments, why don’t we look into how sadness can be beneficial? Research by Forgas suggests that sadness can be beneficial at individual level and interpersonal levels, at least in four ways.

In series of research studies, Forgas asked customers of a gift shop how many out-of-place items they could remember. For better manipulation of participants’ mood, data was collected on seven sunny days and seven miserable cloudy days, while joyful music was played on the sunny days and grey music played on cloudy days. Forgas found that a slight variation in mood would affect shoppers’ attention and recall of objects and yes, sadness beats happiness. On the gloomy days, shoppers were likely to report themselves a little sadder, while they also tended to recall what was on the shop counter more accurately. This extra attention might also act as a psychological deterrent from making mistakes.

Sadness leads to more convincing persuasions

Forgas has conducted other research with happy and sad volunteers making persuasive arguments for or against certain policies. Their arguments were then rated by independent undergraduate students and scientists. Sad participants tended to produce more convincing arguments in more concrete and systematic styles. With other variables controlled, this research suggested that the attention to new information in the outside world when people are sad would promote more concrete and factual thinking and result in generating more persuasive messages.

Sadness reduces stereotypes

The previous studies examine how sadness might benefit us at individual level. But what about at an interpersonal level? How do our moods affect our social responses? Forgas conducted a research study in which participants had to play a video game and shoot the characters that had guns in their hands. Some of the images were made to look Muslim. Participants were more likely to shoot the Muslim targets. However, this bias was reduced among people with negative moods. This suggested that negative moods lessen people’s tendency to rely on simple stereotypes. “When you are sad, you pay more attention to new information in the outside world,” German Psychologist Herbert Bless explains. “We call this being accommodative.”

What would you do when you meet a new group of people and feel like you are in an out-group? This could happen in a freshman orientation camp or when one newly joins a company. Most people would feel a bit down or upset. Sadness can be a signal that we are not getting on or being accepted. Forgas’s research indicates that sadness makes us pay more attention to things around us, be more convincing and alert, and care more about information within the group such as what everybody in the group says. If we could make use of this trend, perhaps we could find easier ways to interact with people as we meet them, helping us better assimilate into a group.

Rainbow after Storm

Conclusion

Instead of simply quoting sayings like “what does not kill me, makes me stronger” to indicate that sadness can make sufferers better able to cope with life’s challenges and spur them to greater achievements, I prefer to adapt scientific findings to show solidly how sadness could actually be good for us.

Positive psychology is NOT a simply quest for happiness. Yes, none of us would want to be sad, but it is very normal to be upset after losing a job, breaking up a relationship, or experiencing the death of a loved one. Instead of eliminating sadness, what positive psychology offers is the science to prevent these negative feelings from turning into conditions such as serious depression. Through evidence-based results, positive psychology shows what we can do to become more resilient, and like the research examined above, it shows us also how we can wisely appreciate the beneficial facet of negative emotions, to embrace them as integral, useful, positive parts of our selves.

Reference

Black, J (2002), Darwin in the world of emotions, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 95 (6): 311–3

Forgas, J.P. (2007). When sad is better than happy: Negative affect can improve the quality and effectiveness of persuasive messages and social influence strategies. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 43, 513-528.

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